Since the mid 70's music synthesizer companies have been attempting to adapt keyboard synthesizer technology to other non-keyboard (non mechanical switch activated) instruments such as guitars, brass, woodwinds, etc. The common techniques involved analog circuit processing which evaluated the frequency and amplitude of incoming musical notes, and then attempted to drive an electronic oscillator to duplicate these characteristics with user selectable parameters. These circuits and processes were pioneered by companies (some now defunct) such as Moog and ARP. However, the techniques were only moderately successful and always required modification to the instrument by way of attached, extraneous hardware. These techniques did not allow for reliable, successful processing by the circuitry and the musician suffered in that he/she could not play in their regular fashion. Even after the musician adapted their technique in an effort to help accommodate the processor, there was not 100% success. Articles have been written about the failure of these devices and industry analysts have even blamed the ARP product (the Avatar) for the downfall of the company.
As the music industry moved into the 1980's, MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Information format) was developed as an industry wide communication protocol such that synthesizers from other manufacturers could communicate with each other and also computer systems. This prompted the synthesizer companies to revisit the technologies which could potentially once again allow other non-keyboard instruments to provide MIDI information to other synthesizers and computers. While there has been some success in this arena, there is still the problem of tracking (getting the hardware to follow all the nuances of the musician's playing). One of the more successful companies which provides guitar synthesizers is Roland. However the technology limitations are still rather severe:    1. The musician must modify their instrument or be required to buy a Roland instrument which can be costly. This also prevents the musician from using their favorite instrument. Furthermore, this generally prohibits musicians from using valuable vintage instruments as modifying them with the necessary hardware would devalue them.    2. The present day MIDI converters for guitars and other instruments can NOT keep up with the musician. The fastest players can confuse and “leave behind” even the best MIDI guitar synthesizer systems resulting in a failure of the synthesizer to play all the notes the musician is playing.    3. The present day MIDI converters also require custom pickups for polyphonic (multi-note) instruments such as guitars, basses, violins, etc. and these signals must be separately sent to the processor, each on their own physical conductor. This eliminates the ability for the musician to use not only a simple single conductor cable, but eliminates the possibility of using other systems such as wireless transmitters.
The method and system outlined in this present invention eliminates all of these issues and in addition offers capabilities that the present manufacturers don't offer. Some of these capabilities would be the processing of 12-string guitars, 8-string basses, gut string basses, and 7-string guitars just to name a few. In fact, the process is so robust, it can process ANY sound from any instrument or recording, even old analog recordings with no digital information on them.
Furthermore the linear frequency shift capabilities of this process allow for not only musical applications, but also bandwidth compression applications which would benefit a wide variety of digital data transmission techniques.